Sewing machine elastic metering devices, per se, are known in the art. Most of these mechanisms include a pair of cooperatively arranged rollers for feeding elastic strips to sewing machines. Some of these mechanisms use various clutch assemblies for imparting motion to the rollers. The use of clutch assemblies, however, also require machine speeds to be reduced whereby reducing production.
In some sewing operations it is desirous to simultaneously feed more than one elastic tape to a sewing machine at varied rates of speed. An example of such an operation may be garment waistbands incorporating two or more variably tensioned elastic tapes for a contoured application incorporating two or more elastic tapes. Most of the heretofore known elastic metering mechanisms are not designed to feed more than one elastic tape to a machine. Accordingly, the present invention is introduced for the first time to accomplish feeding more than one elastic tape to a sewing machine at varying rates from a common input shaft. In addition, the present invention does not include any of those mechanisms which require drastic reductions in machine speeds to accomplish the desired result.